"OpenSUSE has been driving innovation on the Linux desktop, and in today's serial we'll be discovering just what has been happening on the GNOME front. Among other things, openSUSE 10.3 is set to contain, and be among the very first to have, the new GNOME 2.20. We'll see what new things you can expect from this version, what additional polish openSUSE brings to the desktop, and finally we'll be talking to JP Rosevear, an openSUSE and GNOME developer, to find out a little more."

SuSE 6 came with four CDs and a big manual written in Latex in German, and then translated for us Englishers: I know because I bought it. I doubt very much SuSE 4.2 came with more than 7 CDs, in fact I suspect it was less than four. Indeed, when 4.2 was released in 96, KDE had only just been proposed by Matt Ettrich: without KDE or Gnome (which came after 6.0) there was little need for so many CDs. No-one would have used it expecting to get a great desktop experience, the best you could hope for was fvwm95, and the lack of desktop applications meant it was only good enough for people who wanted to use the Unix console.

All of which makes me wonder if you really did use SuSE 4.2, or if you dragged out an obscure reference to back up a somewhat weak, and definitely inflamatory assumption.

Qt and Intel sponsor huge amounts of work in X11; RedHat leads the way in desktop standardisation, and has developed a number of configuration utilities; Novell, with Mono, have done a lot of work in apps like Banshee and others, and Ubuntu have done a lot of work creating configuration utilities (like RedHat) and packaging all the software in a manner conducive to use by non-technical users. They currently lead the pack in that regard, but are by no means the only game in town.